Citations:hoi polloi


 * 1936, George Ralph Doyle, Twenty-Five Years of Films: Reminiscences and Reflections of a Critic (The Mitre Press), page 52
 * Actually, a large proportion of these ingénues have been merely good-looking working girls — hoi pretty polloi, if you like — who wished to become Hollywoodnymphs, and obtained their first chance through winning one of the countless varieties of that damnable institution, the beauty contest.
 * 1975, Australasian Ornithologists’ Union, The Emu, volumes 75–76, page 91
 * Being of hoi ornithological polloi and having been a stranger in some strange lands, I cheer the result because it seems to me that anyone visiting Britain for the first time can now find out quickly and accurately what birds he is likely to see where, when and how commonly.
 * 1978 September 28, British Broadcasting Corporation, The Listener, volumes 100–101, page 409
 * Who’s the nurk at the Corporation, with O-levels in pondlife and master baking, who kept the four-quid handsome edition back to November, and put out a grotty little paperback for the nondescripts and hoi-bleeding-polloi in September?
 * 1985, David Batchelor, Why Tilbury? (J. Cape; ISBN 0224023209, 9780224023207), page 74
 * Briar took Travers’ elbow and withdrew him, he hated hoi giggly polloi.
 * 1988, Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan (Doubleday), page 391, endnote vii.71
 * In Roman letters, this is “oi polloi,” which in Greek means “the people,” that is, once again, the lower classes. As it happens, “oi” means “the” in English, so that it is repetitious to say “the oi polloi.” That only means “the the people.” I have heard some people interpret “oi” (sometimes spelled “hoi”) as a mispronunciation for “high” and then think that “oi polloi” means “high society” — the precise opposite of the truth.
 * 2004 March 21, 2:00pm, Sheila Miguez Herndon, chi.eats (Usenet newsgroup), “Re: Chocolate souffle needed in Chicago limits”, Message ID: 
 * Post a summary here for hoi unwashed polloi.
 * 2011, John Naughton, The Guardian, 8 May 2011:
 * John Carey argued that most of our culture's esteemed thinkers over several centuries despised the masses and devoted much of their efforts to excluding the hoi-polloi from cultural life.